Articles Archive for 9 March 2009

I wouldn't feel right with what the blog has been about lately if Graphjam.com wasn't mentioned. Run by the LoLcatz guys, i find this site addicting and some of the graphs pretty brilliant. Check it out.

So I have to ask what the book Beautiful Evidence means to those who are creating and distributing information online? Looking at one of my previous posts on the redesign of Facebook, I can say quite a lot. The internet has provided us with unending information, but anyone who has ever read a brochure made in MS Word will know, if the information is not presented in an appealing way, it is useless.
The web at its core is still running on a system that was developed decades ago. Pages …

[9 Mar 2009 | Comments Off on Potential Community of Practice Between Government, Wired, and You | ]

I just stumbled on an interesting page on the wired.com website. It's not just any site actually; it's a wiki. The purpose of the wiki is to help make relevant government documents more easily accessible for anyone who wishes to see them.
The goals of the wiki range from reasonable, such as converting the documents out of pdf and lotus files (which apparently, are terrible, from what I gathered), to pie-in-the-sky. Wired's hopes on the possibility of making all government data available fall into the latter category. The …

Having re-read Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence, I’ve found the text more accessible the second time around, but there are still some concepts I’m grabbling with. (These may be the very points Tufte is reinforcing, and so I’m still missing the mark.)

The concept I’m struggling with most is reconciling the perspective that inevitably skews any document an author (or artist) constructs with the concept of “evidence.” I’m not clear on exactly what Tufte is defining as evidence in this book. (Can we discuss this further in class?) We speak often on …

It has been nearly a year since I first read Beautiful Evidenceby Edward Tufte. My initial reaction to the chapter “Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” was similar to the reactions of my classmates who recently read Tufte for the first time—Power Point is evil. Tufte does come off as abrasive in regards to PowerPoint; however, Tufte suggests PowerPoint does have a practical use, but its use should be restricted in the data intense fields of the corporate and bureaucratic world. The PowerPoint program has many limitations, which makes it impractical to …

When reading Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte I came a crossed an interview that he gave about his book as well as many of the issues that he mentions in his other works. I have included one of the many parts that was relevant to Information Architecture, however the entire interview is worth reading.

TCQ: You have a new book coming out this year: Beautiful Evidence. Could you tell us about this project and its relationship to your earlier work?